Podcaster. Writer. 👋 Hello, I want us to go from simply having conversations, to actively creating better conversations — https://craigconstantine.com/ has more about me, and my ongoing projects.
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Forward is the best option
Haiti is the only country where slavery was defeated by a slave revolution — and one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere. You can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into. And here, tucked between the philosophy and the history, is an actual cure for hiccups.
Affordances
Show an adult a meadow and they’ll declare it unplayable. There’s a phrase — “QM’ing to Valhalla” — that describes crawling across the Williamsburg Bridge on your hands and feet toward a destination that doesn’t exist, for reasons that fall apart the moment you try to explain them. Paulo Coelho says there are only four…
You don’t say
Sarcasm turned out to have a simple formula — easy to mimic, adding nothing. Today’s LLMs are astonishing and not yet intelligent, and the word we should be talking about before real AI arrives is agency. Meanwhile, a criterion for a good day sometimes shrinks all the way down to “did a single push-up.”
More present
A million years from now, alien anthropologists will dig up the self-help section and know exactly what we were struggling with. Aurelius points out that the person who betrayed your trust was your own misjudgment. And step two — the one between the big idea and the profit — keeps getting skipped, every time.
Full stop
Someone else’s death isn’t a period — it’s turning the page midway through a book and finding all the remaining pages inexplicably blank. A screw is an application of an inclined plane. And courage, it turns out, doesn’t make things easier; it just keeps raising the difficulty of what you’re willing to attempt.
The gap
The Wright Brothers changed the world, then waited for anyone to notice. Reindeer eyes shift from gold to blue as winter darkness falls — an adaptation that is, somehow, more astonishing than glowing noses. And “calm technology” turns out to be a phrase that, once encountered, cannot be unfound.
The great conversation
Marcus Aurelius stood where Socrates was put on trial, gazing at the Parthenon — all of history a conversation layered, erased, and rewoven. Somewhere in there, a playwright whose obsessive self-reflection only deepens his egotism. And Rousseau points out it’s never ignorance that leads to evil — it’s what people pretend they know.
Choose today
Epictetus has the measure of you: saying “I’ll start tomorrow” is just a polite way of saying “I choose to be abject today.” A Harris hawk perched on your arm weighs nothing, moves like time runs faster for it, and is supremely efficient at killing — but basically dumb as a stump otherwise. Asimov’s note…
Tis’ the season to be thankful
Humans are remarkably reliable in worst-case situations — which turns out to be exactly where AI fails spectacularly. On your deathbed, you’d pay anything for one more ordinary evening, one more car ride, one more juicy peach. Meanwhile, 225 free films are sitting on YouTube waiting, including one that will leave you gobsmacked and horrified…
Wow! Still, wow.
Fifty years on, the Wow! Signal still has no explanation — but now we know which nearby stars have planets in the habitable zone. Tutankhamun’s tomb survived thirty-two centuries perfectly sealed before western archaeologists arrived. And David Bowie, it turns out, only gets more interesting the further in you go.